I have the VX1 and I love it. I works great in NT especially with the latest powerthreads driver. Don't try to run Quake 3 using SMP with the new drivers though. It will crash. The VX1 is a very good, fast and stable card. My next card will definely be the Oxygen RPM as 3Dlabs is a brand that has good products and good support for those products.

3D studio max in my experience is better than lightwave, as it has more tools, and many times makes more sense. Lightwave, in my opinion is much easier to use than 3D studio max however 3D studio max's base program and tools are better than lightwave's. It's a toss up that's for sure, I just put in for my beta version of Maya II by wavefront. I am expecting good things out of them. Carrara a cool program for the money. It will be cooler after all of the bugs are fixed.

Thanx for the response guys, I can always depend on people from renderosity to sto my anger and bring me new faith in my frustrations. to Mark: My platform is: Dual Pentium II 400 256 MB ram Oxygen VX1 WinNT 4.0(SP6) I have the Carrara Patch and it solved many of the problems that I had when rendering, especially the SMP problem that was a real performance hit when rendering. I have been using Lightwave for about 5 years and I am pretty dam used to it but the lightwave modeler in many ways lacks in its interface, however I have the boolean operations down to an art with the modeler, however nurbs in Lightwave (which I hate!) requires too much tweaking when I go to the layout. For that reason I was generally switching between modelers in order to create some of my more complex objects which you can imagine, is very time consuming. I bought Carrara thinking that, yes finally a modeller that I can simply complete my entire mesh and export it to lightwave for scale and layout. That was my whole point in buying Carrara and maybe find a new complete 3D solution all together. But that turned out to be the least of my problems. I will check out Rhino, I hear a bit about it but I have never used it. Lightwave so far has been my most stable 3D solution and I have 3D studio max, lightwave, and raydream. I think that the only thing that keeps me hanging on to Carrara is see what it obviously could be.

I agree with you 100 percent. The tools do not make you a good, it is how you use the tools. And I agree that Lightwave is not for everyone as well, Just as I prefer the "engineering interface" of Lightwave, and Autocad. But I agree with you 100%. I think Carrara is an exceptional tool for beginners and intermediates alike and it will be absolutely awesome once all of the bugs are worked out. Let's just hope that Adobes makes to Carrara what it has made Photoshop. Then!, holy crap! I don't think there would be much out there that can contend. But there is always the issue of price. I just hope Adobe supports the few of us who bought Carrara when it was still in the hands of Metacreations.

Actually Lightwave cost just over $2000.00 and you can get it for less than $2000 at some outlets. 3DSmax cost close to $4000.00 Furthermore, If you wanted to learn programming would you expect to learn it in a couple of days, no! It takes 2 to 4 years to master C++ even after you graduate. The reasons why it takes so long to master Lightwave wave is because they are taking other things into account such as the dynamics of how the program works Lightwave is so much more than modeling and rendering! It allows you to edit every instance of the process in your production.

Some of the reasons why Lightwave choice is a no brainer -stability -industry proven -massive 3rd party support -greater workload -more accepted -better rendering -better effects -better implementation of features standard with package -more complete solution I see what you are saying, but Lightwave is not made for the faint hearted. I have both 3DSmax r2.5 and Lightwave5 and Carrara cannot yet stand against them. Lightwave is not only good for film, many game developers use lightwave for low polygon modeling. It is one of the major reasons why it is a big seller. Most people really only hear about it beacause of its implementation in film. Lightwave is a great, all-around 3D solution, and Carrara can be but it is a not currently and that is the brainer. Engineering Interface, yep, I prefer it that way and many others do too. To me that is simpler but that is only my opinion as I don't really care for the little hands or rotating balls etc... To me those are just redundant features that act as nothing more than eye candy. I learn the keystokes and move on. I could care less about those things because when it comes down to it, and interface can be as pleasing as you can get it, but if the software doesn't deliver what it says it can deliver then it's still an underclass. You cannot say that one software is better than the other based on its difficulty to use. Carrara has an easy interface, but does a shitty job a many things like IK! What makes the difference is Stability and Dynamics. Can the software deliver what I need and can it handle the workload!? YES Lightwave can, and at the present time Carrara cannot. Now that it is in the hands of Adobe, oh yes, I expect to see some good things come out of it or I would have discarded it earlier.

I think that you should move to lightwave. Many of the problems that you are having are alleviated with a simple change in solutions. I have lightwave 5.0 and I have used Raydream, just purchased Carrara, I have 3D studio max and I bought Poser 3 in 1998. Lightwave 5.0, the version I have, as dated as it is still outperforms all of the titles I previously mentioned. Lightwave is a solid and complete package that has excellent support, groups, and has a great history in mass media. Lightwave however is not as user friendly as these other titles, but it is far more user friendly than 3D studio max; it has tons more to offer for the money as well. Furthermore as for animation in Poser from Lightwave, I have done that and you will find that by setting up your own object skeleton in your complete figures exported from Poser or figures you created yourself is far better than poser as you can more easily correct the linking mistakes that exist in the Poser solutions. Raydream is a good solution, but lightwave is just lightyears better and far more stable and you will be able to do more with it whether you are doing analog or digital productions.

Furthermore Carrara has tons of features when it comes to modeling so it is a very nice tool to use modeling so long as you animate IK in another Layout or animator. That set back is however supposed to be fixed in the near future. Anything other than IK animation, go for it. Carrara does a sweet job. And creating poser characters as well.

actually you use many standard modelers to create models for poser. I myself use Lightwave to create characters for Poser on request. It is simply a matter of using a wavefront object which is the type of objects Poser uses. Any decent modeler that can export to the .obj file formats can be used to make models for Poser.

Actually I found Lightwave to be very robust and easy unlike 3D studio max which is not a walk in the park. It is about as bad as Autocad 2000. But I do believe that Carrara can be a very good complete 3D solution for beginners and pro's alike. That is the main reason why I bought Carrara too. It is much faster in producing an end product than lightwave.

Damn I love this forum!

Yeah, thanks guys. We concluded this debate Monday morning and IK is the system. The object skeleton is just a visual methon of control for the IK chain. Yep I did my homework and Metacreation is within the bounds of IK procedurals. What haunts me however is the how sloppy they were done for Carrara, especially after doing Poser. The results the IK solution in Carrara is Pitiful at best.

I agree spanfarkle. Metacreations had the Potential to be the S**T, and something does smell. I cannot say what it is as I really don't know the dynamics of events in the company but what I do know is Metacreations have come out with very good products in the past ie. the Poser Series, infini-d, Bryce, Ray Dream and not to mention thier MONSTER of a program series Fractal Painter and Painter. They had serious alternatives to Lightwave 3D studio max and Adobe Photoshop/illustrator and even though for the most part you had to by serveral packages to have a complete 3D solution, the price still never reached that of what you would pay for Lightwave and 3D studio max. Frankly, Carrara with all of its feature could be a ***** program if all of these features were addresses properly but they obviously won't and these are obvious features such as the IK system, and the 3rd party plugins so it does make one question the true motives of Metacreations.

I do understand what you mean by the cause and effect factor. Truthfully I am not totally dimishing the IK capabilities that Carrara does have. If I create a hierachy chain from leg to hip in Carrara and use a goal object and set the contraints, of course, it is going to act the way IK is supposed to act. And that is the delima that we are stunted with. Surely the IK in Carrara does do what it is supposed to do, however the problem is with the IK chains being made of the separate objects that make up your model. And that is the BIG problem with Carrara. Actually, IK chains are only indigenous to a single mesh. If you two lightwave objects, say a shin and a thigh as separate object files and loaded them into the layout and created a IK chain based on the Thigh, the shin will be uneffected by the chain because the bones are indigenous only to the thigh will only activate the vertices of the object it is indigenous to. In order to for the shin and the thigh to be effect you must create a single mesh. The shin and the thigh does not have to be connected but it must be a single file mesh. Only then can both the shin and the thigh be effected by a single IK chain. In order to do that I reiterate single mesh because that is what IK is designed for. To created realistic human movement without degredation to the model "So say my infamous Lightwave tutorial tapes. And that is why I question the validity of Carrara IK because you cannot do that without some kind of Object skeleton. Furthermore if you have poser, turn on fast tracking and pan the camera around. I f you think that those are bounding boxed that you see taking place of the poser model, you are wrong, that is the object skeleton that poser uses for its IK chains. I have both 3D studio max r2.5 and Lightwave 5.0 and I have yet to see and IK system in any product including poser which does not use an object skeleton. That is my argument, but you have a VERY VALID POINT

Actually, Poser does use bones, If you have ever created a poser model, there are serveral things that you must do in order for your model to move correctly. This can be seen while edit inclusion and exclusion angles and blend zones while coverting your model to Poser. Don't be mistaken, poser does use an object skeleton. Metacreations just does not refer to it in Poser. But lets go back futher to the origin of CG animation. 1. There the model based hierachies. I guess we all know about this. The different objects that are attached at pivot points and placed along the body to create the appearance of human and animal motion. The disadvantage to this process was that there were seams in the model at best, and at worst, the object had to be broken up, as it does in Cararra. 2. Morphing came along and it was revolutionary for a while because you could make seamless models and have great animations and very real movements. The disadvantage of this process is that you had to have so objects of that same model for the computer to reference to go from one step to the next. This called for more processing power and slower renders. 3. The advent of Inverse Kinematics. This was the life saver. Now you had the advantage of seamless models and fluid motion without the headache of slow renders because so many objects of the same model existed. Take you mesh and complete it as though it were a sculpture, add an object skeleton and animate it. Now what poser did was took all of the separate object and converted them into a single mesh by welding the vertices and forming a single mesh and that is why when you stretch and object in poser while the centerpoint is out of place it stretches the entire polygon as it would in any modeler. Before you can even start editing a custom object in poser you have to first create a text file for the object hierachy and then the IK chain at the bottom of the text file. Now with the way this operates I cannot exclude the use of an object skeleton or bones in any system of inverse kinematics because anything else would go back to where animation begun. You can create and object hierachy and use constraints and goal objects and not have IK. Because that is where it all began. IK is the manipulation of a SINGLE MESH, not many objects as it is in carrara through the use of a hierarchial skeleton. Now I tried welding vertices in Carrara within my hierarchial chain so that my objects would not break up when I bent the knee for example but everytime I did it, the program crashed with a runtime error. GO figure. And if you read all of this I commend you.